'SHAFT' (1971)......HAPPY 50TH TO ONE BAD MOTHER-(SHUT YOUR MOUTH!)... BUT WE'RE TALKIN' 'BOUT SHAFT! (THEN WE CAN DIG IT...)

Shaft (1971)......wasn't technically the first 'blaxploitation' movie, but due to its enormous success, it jump started the genre.....(much in the same way "A Fistful Of Dollars" inspired the avalanche of spaghetti westerns and "The Bird With The Crystal Plumage" opened the bloody floodgates to the Italian "Giallo" kinky slasher thrillers....)

             50 years later, how's it hold up?

             Isssac Hayes themE song, which we freely borrowed from for this post's subtitle, remains the coolest.

            Richard Roundtree is still the angriest, baddest badass private detective, strolling through murderous Times Square traffic like he's protected by a force field.

             Speaking of Times Square.....there it is in all its depraved, dirty and dangerous glory, decades before it became the Disney-fied theme part tourist attraction that we now see every day on 'Good Morning America'......

              And the movie?

              Still fast and furious, with Shaft trying to rescue the innocent daughter of a Harlem crime kingpin (Moses Gunn) after she's been abducted by mafia goons. (Gunn's pleading with Shaft to take on this quest constitutes the only actual acting you'll see here.)

               It's a raggedy looking film and you tell tell that MGM assigned it a budget even lower than one of Roger Corman's shot-in-3-days wonders.

               But celebrated photojournalist and  film director Gordon Parks infuses the film with a a raw streetwise energy that served as a template for the dozens upon dozens of imitators that followed in "Shaft"s wake.

             (Several months after "Shaft"s release, along came William Friedkin's groundbreaking "The French Connection" which set off a parallel  but similar genre to Blaxsploitation,  - movies that specifically displayed New York City as an urban hell on earth.)

               From the film's very first moments, it's made clear that  Roundtree's inwardly cool and outwardly hot-tempered John Shaft takes crap from nobody, even Vic Androzzi, (Charles Cioffi), the one and only New York detective not depicted as a rabid racist. 

               Androzzi wearily weathers Shaft's contempt for any authority other than his own, and mostly sits back and lets our hero cut a bloody swath through the Mafia thugs. 

               And how can you not root for Shaft, a guy so tough he takes an apparent bullet to the chest and heals within a couple hours or less?

                 So Happy 50th Birthday, to a still indestructible film hero who became a cinema icon. 4 stars...(****).